TED Talks Daily
What sitting all day does to your brain and body | Keith Diaz | Your Body on Tech
22 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. Hello. No, I am not Elise Hu. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. I'm a journalist, an author, a two-time TED speaker, and you might recognize my voice because I host the TED Radio Hour podcast over on NPR. So why am I here?
Well, this week, I am taking over from Elise to bring you something a little special, a series of episodes all about how you can live a healthier life in our high-tech era. Because in April, I had the honor of guest curating a session at the TED 2026 conference
And I packed it full of speakers whose work I have been obsessed with and who I think will make you think differently about your body, how you use your technology, and what is keeping us human in this digital age. So every day this week, we are bringing you one of these talks from my session, followed by a conversation with these incredible speakers to go deeper. Really, truly, they are amazing.
Let's begin with a feeling, okay? That end of the day, so drained, can barely think, exhausted feeling that comes after spending hours on our devices. Physiologist Keith Diaz knows that feeling.
I was still tired, exhausted actually, but I hadn't used my body at all.
I met Keith in 2023 when I came across research he'd done in his lab at Columbia University Medical Center. This is where he studies how lives spent mostly sitting and looking at screens affects our health.
We are living in the most sedentary era in modern history. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately, early death. This is true even if you exercise regularly.
Yeah, it's awful. But Keith has spent his career trying to figure out the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs every day so that you don't die an early death. Our teams at NPR and Columbia ended up partnering to see if we could get his research out into the world. We wanted to find out, could people take movement breaks throughout their day
and take back their health from their sedentary screen-filled lives. And we ended up creating one of the largest citizen science studies ever. If you follow me on social media, you have probably seen me post about this study. We called it Body Electric. And very recently, I put out a book by the same name, which has these findings at the heart of it.
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Chapter 2: What are the effects of sitting all day on our health?
This isn't unique to highly trained endurance athletes. If you took a regular, typical healthy adult and forced them to 40 days of bed rest, their heart would show changes similar to 50 years of aging. Now, this isn't about missing a workout or two. Exercise only makes up a tiny fraction of your day. The toxicity comes from when movement begins to disappear from your life.
And this begs the question, why isn't exercise alone enough? Part of the answer lies in our muscles. Our muscles are more than just the machinery that power movement. They're also really important for regulating things like our metabolism. Let's use blood sugar as an example. Our muscles are like sponges for blood sugar. When we regularly use and contract our muscles,
They're like a moist sponge, soaking up the sugar from the bloodstream. But when we don't regularly use and contract our muscle, like a dry and shriveled-up sponge, it's not really good at soaking up anything. Now, here's the key. When we exercise, it rewets the sponge. But eventually, that sponge dries out if you get little to no movement the rest of your day. So what do we do?
Well, we need to keep the sponge moist. Now, I'm not going to tell you that we need to move all day. Instead, I'm going to suggest that we follow the lead of an unlikely place, the tobacco industry. In their early days, cigars were their primary product, but this was the Industrial Age.
Millions were working in factories, and those workers only got short breaks from their lines, certainly not long enough to smoke a cigar. Thus, the cigarette became the primary focus of the tobacco industry, so that these workers could get their fix in small, short doses, a few minutes at a time, throughout the day. And if sitting truly is the new smoking,
As the saying goes, then what better way to fight back than to use the approach of the tobacco industry, but instead of smoke breaks, movement breaks. Short bouts of movement, a few minutes at a time, sprinkled in throughout the day. If our muscles need regular use to function optimally, then outside of any exercise time, we need to be contracting them frequently through movement.
The question that we asked in my lab is, what's the least amount of mood breaks that we need in order to offset the harms of being highly sedentary? And the answer we found was a five-minute walk every half hour. This reduced the blood sugar spike after eating by about 60 percent.
That's the size of a reduction you would expect to see if you put someone on medication to manage their blood sugar levels. The cool part is that our participants weren't sprinting or even walking fast. This was a stroll. They were walking at two miles an hour. Now, I want to be honest.
What I'm proposing to you as the answer to our modern sedentary lives are five-minute movement breaks every hour, or every half hour, I should say. The truth is that when I found out that this was the answer, I was disappointed.
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Chapter 3: How does sedentary behavior increase health risks?
My immediate reaction was, there's no way people are going to do this, largely because I couldn't realistically do it myself. And so part of me wondered whether this should be the end of the road for my research on movement breaks. But rather than argue with the data, I decided to press forward and put it to the test in the real world.
With a little help from public radio, we had over 20,000 people try our experiment to take movement breaks throughout the day, anywhere from every half hour to every two hours for two weeks. And to my surprise, the vast majority of people liked taking movement breaks. Many wanted to keep going. We had tapped into something that people were craving, an antidote to our toxic modern lives.
But what really surprised me is that when we asked people what they liked about movement breaks, very few touted the physical health benefits. Instead, what they liked was how the movement breaks made them feel. They loved that they felt energized, that they no longer felt like they were in this brain fog throughout the day. that they're able to actually better focus at work.
And this really resonated with me and my experiences as an office worker and how the exhaustion impacted my life. I remember when my kids were younger, they'd come home from my office job, I'd open the door, and they'd greet me with energy and enthusiasm and want me to immediately start playing with them. And I just didn't have it in me. I was too drained from the day.
And that's one of the most striking findings that we see in the lab. Over the course of sitting all day with no movement, people's mood plummets while their fatigue builds and builds. And that's because our muscles have a symbiotic relationship with our brains.
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Chapter 4: What is the minimum movement needed to maintain health?
They're in constant communication. Our biological need to contract muscle is more than just about physical health and metabolism. It's also foundational to mental and brain health.
The promising news is that in our real-world experiment, our participants only averaged four to five movement breaks a day, far below our lab-tested prescription, and yet they still reduced their feelings of fatigue by about 25 percent. And we see this play out in the lab as well.
Something as small as a one-minute walk every hour can still largely offset the impact of sitting all day on your mood. So even small, short, infrequent movement breaks can counter some, not all, but some of the hidden costs of our sedentary lives.
Now, one of the biggest concerns I often hear from employers in schools about movement breaks is that they worry that it's disruptive, that it'll hurt productivity and performance. But movement doesn't mean you have to stop working. You can have walking meetings. Pace around while you're on a call. Get walking pads. Or somebody just move around while thinking.
But the bigger idea and concept with movement breaks is that when you compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.
And that's where the real challenge lies. Productivity culture, convenience culture and technology are reengineering our lives and steadily removing the need for movement. We can have groceries delivered and robots vacuum our floors without ever getting off the couch. And the consequences of this reengineering is that we now often see movement ... as an inconvenience.
We see it as an interruption. We see it as something to avoid. I saw this play out with my daughter recently, when I had to drive her to our local library. But when we got there, the parking lot was full.
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Chapter 5: How can small movement breaks improve well-being?
So I had to park a little further away on the street, and she immediately started complaining that I had parked so far away. Now, mind you, the place I had parked may have added an additional 20 seconds of walking to her life. Not a mile, but 20 seconds. But that moment hit me. Movement had become an inconvenience for my daughter, too.
So I gave her a classic dad lecture, and this was met with a preteen eye roll. But a few days later, we were leaving a stadium, and I was taking the escalator down. As I'm going down, I see something pass by, and I look, and it's my daughter taking the regular set of stairs, happily taking the regular set of stairs, smiling at me as she goes by. It was a small victory.
And if my eye-rolling preteen can make this shift on occasion, then I have hope for the rest of us. Because movement breaks are ultimately about something bigger.
They're about seeing those small moments in your day, when you have the opportunity to move, to see them not as inconveniences, but as a way to reconnect our bodies and our brains so we're not living some tired, drained version of ourselves. Thank you.
That was Columbia University Medical Center physiologist Keith Diaz. In a minute, my conversation with Keith about the scientific findings that are about to be published. I am super excited about that. And what it takes to actually change the systems that keep us so sedentary in our lives. I am always learning from Keith. You will too. Don't go away.
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Chapter 6: What does the Body Electric study reveal about movement?
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Thank you. Do you remember being a kid and getting asked what you wanted to be when you grew up? We all do, but the truth is that most of us don't figure it out until we're well into adulthood. I'm Anne Morris, co-host of Fixable. And this month on our podcast, we're tackling the daunting question of how to find your purpose at work.
Whether you're lost, stuck, or just quietly wondering if there's something more to come for your career, we're tackling it all on Fixable. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, so you just gave your TED Talk about this project.
Chapter 7: How can we integrate movement into our daily routines?
I was the NPR person. We partnered with you and your team over at Columbia to do this study. But, you know, as I've sort of been talking to people about the work that we've done and the book that's come out about the project, the thing that really...
catches people, Keith, and really makes them mad and sad is this idea that doing a morning workout or taking an evening jog won't undo a day of sitting and looking at a screen. Can we just unpack like your own coming to grips with that information? Because there is a backstory here.
Yeah, let's normalize that reaction first. That's totally appropriate. I had the same initial reaction. It's why I started the research that I'm doing. When I was a doctoral student, I came across some news headline. It was like in Runner's World magazine. And there was a headline that said something like, sitting is the new smoking, even if you're a runner.
And I was like, you know, as a runner, as an exercise physiologist in training, I tend to see exercise as the cure-all, prevent-all for everything. And so for this article to put it out there that like, you know, what you do exercise-wise, you're running, that's not enough. I didn't believe it. And so I set off in my career to debunk that and show that, you know, that's not true.
Exercise can overcome. Sitting isn't the kryptonite to exercise. And here we are almost 15 years later and... Man, I've come to see it in a very different light. And the way that I think about it now is I picture like the iceberg, that exercise is just the tip of the iceberg that we focus on, that's on the surface that we see.
And that there's so much underneath when it comes to what does a healthy movement profile look like. And why I say it's the tip of the iceberg, because if you do the math, you exercise 30 minutes a day, that's only 2% of your day. Is 2% of your day really going to offset the other 98% of the day that you're not moving?
Can you just explain, like, people want to know, they're like, how long is sitting for too long going to cause all these problems? What exactly is the mechanism? Let's talk about the sponge that you brought up in your talk.
Yeah.
Yeah. So first I want to start with by saying that if you are an exerciser, that's great. Keep doing it. You are far better off and healthier as an exerciser who sits all day than as a non-exerciser who sits all day. So I think that's the first and most important part, that your exercise that you're doing still matters. But what we're learning is that our body was designed
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